Kimberly K. Emmons
Case Western Reserve University

Visiting the Outposts:
The Future of Writing in a Seminar Approach to General Education

Do not cite without permission of the author.

I served as Director of Composition at Case Western Reserve University for two academic years (2004-2006).  They were two years that, coincidentally, spanned the transition from a “local” writing program (housed entirely within the English department – a “Comp Nation” with relative autonomy, which sent its missionaries out on remediation tours) to a “distributed” general education and writing program (housed nebulously within the entire university, but administered from the office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences – the beginnings of an empire, which promises to create “one university” through critical thinking and writing).  Begun as a faculty-led initiative to improve student learning and retention, this new program – the Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship (SAGES) 2 – seeks to replace traditional content-based general education requirements with cross-disciplinary seminars that bring students into the intellectual life of the university (an advanced citizenship course rather than a vocabulary test).  The practicalities of maintaining this new empire, however, were perhaps underestimated in the early stages of expansion, and the genres of administration are only now beginning to be formulated.  What follows is an attempt – grounded in a snapshot of student evaluations of the writing instruction they received in one semester’s seminars – to understand some of the occasions for program development and curricular redefinition that the transition to this newly expanded writing empire might afford.

At first glance, Case appears to have abolished its writing program in Fall 2005, when SAGES was implemented as the required general education curriculum for all students.3   SAGES represents itself as a “bold new” curriculum that “connects…students with Case’s faculty and culture, and with other University Circle institutions [e.g., the Cleveland Museum of Art], in a series of small, interdisciplinary seminars.”4   In internal campus documents describing the program, SAGES appears to herald a change to the culture of the campus, bringing research faculty into contact with first-year students, and encouraging interdisciplinary inquiry throughout the undergraduate curriculum.  The program promises that students will “acquire the knowledge and analytical skills necessary to solve real-world problems, as well as the power to articulate their ideas effectively in both speech and writing.”  Thus, writing and speaking are seen as ancillary skills necessary to communicate knowledge and solutions, but not as central to the mission of the program.  Nevertheless, the SAGES curriculum was explicitly tasked with distributing the “skills” taught in the previous writing requirement course – English 150, “Expository Writing” (see Appendix A) – across three seminars that fall into the pre-disciplinary categories of “Thinking about the Natural World,” “Thinking about the Social World,” and “Thinking about the Symbolic World.”  Students take a First Seminar (4 credit hours) in their initial semester on campus and then enroll in two additional University Seminars (3 credit hours each) over the subsequent three semesters.  At the end of the second year, students submit a writing portfolio to certify their completion of the university “composition requirement,” and they move into courses that address disciplinary forms of writing – including a Departmental Seminar and a Senior Capstone project – within their major fields.  In its first year of full implementation (AY 05-06), a faculty committee developed a set of program outcomes for SAGES, and in the following year the English department offered a more delimited set of writing outcomes for First and University Seminars (see Appendix B).  Despite these modest administrative genres, however, the SAGES program delegates curricular authority to individual faculty members, in effect ceding colonial administration to them.

Clearly, Case did not eliminate its writing program – indeed the position of “Director of Composition” still exists, and still resides in the English department (now, thankfully, vested in a tenured colleague), albeit with an ambiguous relationship to the SAGES program administration in general.  Further, faculty not trained in the teaching of writing work in collaboration with either a “Writing Co-Instructor” or a “Writing Liaison” – two new teaching roles filled by English (and, to a lesser extent, other humanities) graduate students, full- and part-time lecturers (with Ph.D.s), and a variety of other adjunct faculty (most without Ph.D.s).  Writing Co-Instructors work collaboratively with faculty primarily in First Seminars (taken in the students’ first semester at Case); Writing Liaisons offer consulting hours to University Seminar faculty, often leading classroom workshops, commenting on student drafts, and working one-on-one with writers in each seminar.  In many ways, the writing program has expanded exponentially in terms of faculty, instructional complexity, and administrative scope.  All of this has happened, however, without a deliberate attempt to understand the role of writing within this new curriculum, and without a clear set of assessment tools.5  

Writing instruction has become the property and responsibility of all Case faculty, and the role of the English department – in establishing new writing outcomes, in offering human and curricular writing support services, in certifying students’ accomplishments in their final portfolios – has not been clearly defined.  In the previous system (“Comp Nation”), most sections of the composition requirement (English 150) were taught by English graduate students, but tenure-track faculty also taught sections on a regular rotation.  Under SAGES, English graduate students, now joined by a host of part- and full-time lecturers and adjuncts, perform all of the writing support roles for faculty outside of English, and tenure-track English faculty lead seminars (without writing support) in regular rotation.  The SAGES seminars are not, however, full-time writing courses; they also form first-year students’ advising cohorts (faculty seminar leaders serve as academic advisors), familiarize students with local cultural resources, and orient students to academic life on campus.  Writing has been resituated within the larger intellectual life of the university, a move which appears to offer a new geography of instruction – writing has the potential to be recognized as integral to academic inquiry – but which also risks the potential for its elimination from the curriculum altogether.

In order to understand the new landscape in which writing is embedded, I turn to a snapshot of student evaluations, collected in Fall 2006 in 44 First Seminars.  In an extensive program evaluation (7 pages), SAGES asks students to comment on their participation in each seminar.  In terms of their writing instruction, students rate their agreement with the statement “My participation improved my ability to write” on a 1 (not at all) to 7 (a lot) scale.  Additionally, in a later section of the evaluation, entitled “More Questions about Writing,” students are asked to rate four statements on the same (1-7) scale: “In this seminar, we devoted significant attention to writing,” “In this seminar, I received helpful feedback on my writing,” “The writing assignments were well-designed and contributed to my development as a writer,” and “I improved my writing skills by revising my seminar papers.”  Students’ responses to these items suggest a number of administrative challenges for writing in SAGES, of which I will focus on two: faculty development and disciplinarity.

Faculty Development
Faculty development represents one of the trickiest administrative challenges for writing across the curriculum programs such as SAGES.6   Student evaluation data, however, underscores its necessity.  With data coded for faculty discipline, the results suggest that seminars led by faculty in the humanities and social sciences offer more writing instruction to students (see Table 1). 

Table 1: Student Evaluations of Writing Instruction by Faculty Discipline

When the data are coded for the level of writing support – in this case Writing Co-Instructors, from graduate students to lecturers holding Ph.D.s – students rate the seminars staffed with the least professionalized (and, not coincidentally, lowest paid) writing faculty lower than other seminars (see Table 2).  Interestingly, the seminars led by humanities faculty and lecturers without Writing Co-Instructors are rated the highest in terms of writing instruction. 

Table 2: Student Evaluations of Writing Instruction by Writing Support Category

While it is tempting to draw a number of conclusions from these data – including the dubious one that collaborative teaching produces negative results – I hesitate to do so for a number of reasons.  First, student evaluation data collected at the end of the term is certainly not the best indicator of successful writing instruction.  Then, the SAGES outcomes were newly published, and therefore not necessarily widely read, in fall 2006 (when these surveys were collected); and, the writing outcomes were not developed until December 2006, in preparation for spring 2007 instruction.  Finally, the sample size (1 semester, only 44 seminars responding) and question format (the writing questions occur in two places within the 7-page questionnaire) are mitigating factors.  Nevertheless, these data do suggest that energies should be devoted to working with faculty from disciplines that have not traditionally taught writing.  In addition, support and professional development for graduate student writing instructors (and other categories of contingent labor) remain important issues for program administration.  Such conclusions are hardly surprising, but the fact that student ratings so clearly highlight both disciplinary and status differences among instructors suggests that the “natives” are far more discerning than colonial administrators often realize; in a consumerist model of university life, we ignore these indications at our own peril.

Disciplinarity
One of the most common concerns about SAGES seems to be the applicability of SAGES instruction to students’ research and participation within their chosen fields or disciplines.  (As a traditionally strong technical school, Case draws students who are particularly motivated towards pre-professional education.)  For example, engineering students in my own First Seminar (just concluded this past semester) saw little need for my heavy emphasis on invention.  Humanities majors, on the other hand, bridled at the restrictions imposed by “templates” for academic writing (I used Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing).  In both cases, the students seem to be operating under an assumption that writing in their chosen field(s) has little in common with the practices of writing in other fields.  From what I gathered through our lively class discussions, these assumptions reflect both the early professionalization of Case students and also their desire to be “practical.”  These reactions led me to wonder whether students might rate their writing instruction higher if they felt a “match” between their own interests and those of the faculty member leading the seminar.  As two test cases, I chose one seminar led by an engineering faculty member (the highest rated of the Engineering seminars) and one led by a humanities lecturer (similarly, the highest rated).  Sorting the data by students’ self-reported academic interests does bear out the hypothesis that a “match” between seminar leader and student interests results in higher evaluations (see Figure 1).  Whether this reflects more learning or better skills cannot be determined by student evaluation data, but clearly students respond more positively to faculty members whose interests align more closely with their own.

Figure 1: Student Evaluations by "Match" with Faculty Discipline

SAGES writing instruction – even in its early, pre-disciplinary seminars offered in the first- and second-years of the undergraduate curriculum – appears to confirm the notion of writing as a mode of socialization.  Michael Carter, Miriam Ferzli, and Eric N. Wiebe suggest this as a model for writing in the disciplines programs in general.  Calling for more “situated learning” – where students are given disciplinary problems to solve – Carter et al suggest that in such an educational paradigm, “Teaching would be understood as creating opportunities for students to learn by doing the kinds of activities full members do, though in a form appropriate for apprentices.  And writing would be understood as the critical link between doing and knowing in the disciplines” (299).  SAGES certainly employs this rhetoric – offering students the chance to solve “real-world problems” – and the students we enroll at Case see themselves as pre-professionals, eager for the opportunities to participate in their chosen disciplines.  Perhaps, then, the new writing empire must learn to provide explicit links between practices of disciplinary inquiry and writing activities, even those writing activities that occur in pre-disciplinary seminars.
           

Writing “Skills” and Pedagogical Remediation
Having considered student feedback on writing instruction in SAGES, I turn now to the informal assessments – offered anecdotally – of writing instructors tasked with evaluating the final writing portfolios submitted by students at the end of three First and University seminars.  One reader sums up her experience grading SAGES portfolios this way:

I think that the most common strengths come from the fact that these students are older and more experienced [than students completing the one-semester composition course].  So the papers are just a lot more interesting.  Based on the reflection essays, I also think that the students get a better feel for the writing process itself—they are able to have more ownership over their writing and to see what they need to work on—because they’ve experienced the continuity and confusion of having different writing instructors.  Sometimes, however, some of the basics (like citation) slip through the cracks.

Other portfolio readers agree that, when compared to the final products of a one-semester composition course, the essays collected at the end of the first two years of the SAGES program offer more engagement – they show evidence of more sophisticated summaries and applications of complex ideas – but that they quite often also display more mechanical errors, greater difficulty deploying academic citation practices, and increased troubles with organizational structures and “roadmapping” strategies that accommodate readers.  Thus, within the new empire of writing, many of the traditional gatekeeping functions of the writing program seem to have been deferred indefinitely.  Such indications of “backsliding” often lead to renewed calls for “skills” instruction (grammar drills and proofreading rubrics), but I see a larger intellectual problem facing our new writing empire.  If students are, indeed, more engaged in the topics of their SAGES seminars, then that interest ought to be harnessed toward producing technically fluent communication as well as enthusiastic research.  We need new tools for teaching “skills” in the context of (pre)disciplinary inquiry, new methods for involving disciplinary faculty in the teaching of writing as a practice that is integral to academic participation.

I am afraid that I must conclude without fulfilling my promise to predict the future of writing instruction in the SAGES program.  We seem to be at a critical moment in the formation of our empire.  Ceding control over writing instruction to the entire faculty risks dissolution – frustrated by a lack of writing “skills,” some faculty have suggested that a high-stakes test of mechanical correctness is the only way to administer this program.  Yet, it also promises new forms of collaboration – the English department has joined the School of Engineering in the creation of a technical writing seminar that serves as an introduction to disciplinary writing for all engineering students, and other professional programs have expressed interest in similar collaborations.  It is my hope that the latter course prevails, not least because it seems to attend most fruitfully to the “natives” of our empire, who clearly wish to see themselves as members of research communities.  In fact, within such a configuration, writing becomes an integral practice that accomplishes disciplinary activities instead of an ancillary skill that requires constant surveillance and remediation. Writing this empire will, however, require new forms of interdisciplinary cooperation and coordination; it will require pedagogical remediation.

Appendix A: Outcomes for English 150 – Expository Writing (pre-2005)

ENGL 150 is a course in composition and expository writing, and a substantial amount of writing is required (approximately 7,000 words [28-30 pages]; 4-5 assignments [that each include various prewriting, drafting, and revising exercises], one assignment is an 8-10 pages research paper incorporating & citing appropriate sources; in-class essay examinations at the instructor's discretion). The goals of ENGL 150 are:

• To give students guided practice at forming compelling and sophisticated claims (thesis statements) for an academic audience and supporting those claims with sufficient, typical, accurate, and relevant evidence;
• To help students recognize, write, and support the different kinds of claims prevalent in all forms of expository writing: factual, causal, evaluative, and deliberative (i.e., proposals);
• To assist students in meeting usage standards of academic readerships;
• To teach students the academic conventions of incorporating and citing the words and ideas of other writers and speakers;
• To guide students in gathering, evaluating, and using different kinds of research sources;
• To teach students how to summarize the thoughts and words of other writers;
• To improve students' ability to read critically;
• To help students develop systematic patterns of topic development and organization;
• To teach students techniques for helping readers perceive your writing as coherent;
• To make students aware of word and sentence level stylistic options; and

• To increase students' awareness of the importance of revision, as well as to provide you with effective techniques for revision.

Appendix B: Outcomes for SAGES (Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship) – Developed in Spring 2006

Mission: The SAGES program is a seminar-based, writing-intensive learning experience that emphasizes collaboration, transformative thinking, and scholarly inquiry. Students and faculty work together to explore the ideas, individuals, and innovations that have shaped human inquiry in a variety of fields. Each SAGES course invokes the power of seminar discussion and foregrounds writing and public speaking to promote the learning of all participants. The program’s developmental sequence deliberately moves from general forms of inquiry, writing, and oral presentation to those practiced in individual scholarly disciplines. Because oral and written presentation skills are fundamental to the SAGES curriculum, the following Learning Outcomes serve as the critical “common thread” throughout the program.

I. First Seminar introduces students to the Case academic community, including the unique opportunities for collaboration with the University Circle Institutions and the city of Cleveland, and emphasizes modes of inquiry, writing, and speaking used throughout the University.  At the end of First Seminar, students should be able to:

• Engage in thoughtful, productive discussion with peers, faculty, and other professionals
• Give and receive criticism respectfully and constructively
• Establish a personal voice in oral and written expression
• Present concepts and beliefs in clear, precise, and graceful language
• Frame substantial arguments, first by making interesting claims and then by marshaling and interpreting relevant evidence
• Assess whether an argument (including their own) is properly supported according to basic academic standards
• Demonstrate awareness and engagement with different perspectives or positions in their own writing (opposing positions, alternative proposals, etc.)
• Recognize their responsibilities—as writers and speakers, readers and listeners—in promoting scholarly dialogue, and then meet those responsibilities
• Analyze and assess different kinds of writing from a variety of sources
• Refine their phrasing, analyses, and arguments through a rigorous process of revision

II. University Seminars build on the common experiences in the First Seminar and focus on academic modes of thinking and writing specific to scholarly discourse about the natural and technological world, the social world, and the symbolic world. These topical courses offer cross-disciplinary insight and attention to effective inquiry and presentation.
Students in University Seminars continue to develop the skills and dispositions emphasized in First Seminar. In addition, they should be acquiring the ability to:

• Pose a relevant, narrowly focused research question
• Construct extended arguments that incorporate quotations and ideas from multiple sources
• Analyze and evaluate a variety of sources and forms of evidence
• Demonstrate thorough familiarity with one method of citation and follow its conventions—not mechanically, but with full appreciation of their ethical significance

III.  Departmental Seminars introduce students to disciplinary modes of inquiry and presentation.  Students in Departmental Seminars continue to develop the skills and dispositions emphasized in First and University Seminars. In addition, they should be acquiring the ability to:

• Articulate a question or problem of interest to the discipline
• Skillfully employ research methods to address that question or problem
• Produce clear, precise academic prose in appropriate modes (e.g., lab report, close reading, analytical argument, persuasive argument, quantitative analysis)
• Provide useful, relevant criticism to others—and respond constructively to criticism—within a disciplinary context

IV.  Senior Capstone Projects encourage students to pursue independent research and scholarship, with the guidance of faculty from their chosen major or discipline.  In their Senior Capstone Projects, students demonstrate their ability to:

• Articulate a problem or question that is both interesting and relevant to their chosen field(s) of study
• Identify an appropriate research method or analytical response to the question or problem, and present the method/approach in discipline-specific modes of writing (such as a project proposal)
• Conduct sustained research—designing and conducting experiments, exploring an archive, analyzing data, reading publications in their field—sufficient to draw conclusions significant to their discipline
• Produce a substantial presentation in response to the question or problem

“English Department Writing Outcomes” (added December 2006)

By the end of First Seminar, students should be able to:

• Engage critically and considerately with the written ideas of peers.
• Identify and summarize the main points of a published piece of writing supplied by the instructor.
• Respond critically in writing to scholarly ideas from a variety of perspectives or positions.
• Craft a specific question that can form the basis for sustained inquiry on a topic.
• Identify representative University and University Circle resources to support writing projects.
• Write in a consistent, clear, and grammatical personal voice.
• Reflect critically on their own ideas.
• Describe Case's Academic Integrity Policy.
• Explain the role of and significance of differences among various citation formats (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.).
• Refine phrasing and ideas through directed revision.

By the end of a University Seminar, students should be able to:

• Identify, summarize, and respond critically to an array of scholarly ideas and texts gathered through independent research.
• Develop a focused, informed, and specific research question (appropriate to the topic of the course and to the context of a scholarly problem).
• Define a scholarly position in a clear, grammatical voice that is characteristic of an academic community.
• Draft persuasive and/or analytical arguments of appropriately delimited scope for a 10-12 page paper. These arguments should include strong and clear claims, appropriate presentation and interpretation of evidence, and substantial exploration of the warrants/backings that authorize them.
• Cite consistently and comprehensively a variety of print and electronic resources using a citation format appropriate to the area of inquiry.
• Demonstrate a facility with the sentence structures and rhetorical moves most common to academic writing.
• Demonstrate a capacity for self-directed revision of writing for effective argumentation and for stylistic clarity.